Puns, Eggcorns, and Other Grammar Ridiculosities

    English grammar is a funny thing, especially on the Internet. While you may have noticed that I, and many bloggers like myself, use extremely good grammar as much as we can, comments on blog posts, YouTube videos, and Internet forums often have entertaining grammar slips. Furthermore, at least in Utah, there are even more hilarious mispronunciations of commonly-used words.

    Here is a very old blog post on this topic, which is part of the inspiration for the blog post I am writing today--and it's hilarious to boot!

    All right. When talking with me, please do not axe any questions. Such treatment is not very good for them, and they usually don't survive. Asking is a much better way to use questions, as that way you will actually get an answer instead of a sad jumble of broken words. So long as you don't reverse the 's' and 'k' sounds in the word ask, you'll be fine. ;)

    Furthermore, fellow Utahns (I hear this isn't as much of an issue elsewhere), they are not moun'ins, they are mountains. Don't forget that "t", as it's very impor'ant (oddly, I get the last "t", but not the first; some people I've heard drop both). Okay, fair enough; I make this mistake too, and not just with the moun'ins. But I am trying to train myself out of i'... Snap. I don' even always pronounce my t's on words like it and don't! Am I a bad grammar Nazi? Fortunately it seems that I only make these mistakes when I'm talking fast... which still means I make them a lot, but at least I don't make them all the time! :)

    Another amusing one I've run into, though only with one person so far, is the mispronunciation of onions as EYEnions. I am also guilty of saying aynkshint instead of ancient (ayn-chint). Perhaps you have also made these mistakes; perhaps not.

    Today, I also ran into this: Calm, cool, and collective. I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I was under the impression that the proper way of saying it was calm, cool, and collected.

    There is actually a whole writing subforum dedicated to this topic. Go and check it out; you'll learn cool stuff about eggcorns and mondegreens and so on, and the Wikipedia article on mondegreens is actually super entertaining!

    But that's just spoken language; what about written communication?

    If you read the post I linked to above, then you already know about the Alot, and I won't cover that one here. Heck, I may not even have to cover written-Internet-comment-ese at all!

   Still, I think it worth noting that I have an extreme abhorrence towards text-speech. I'm the sort of person who uses complete sentences in almost every text for the sake of clarity (and so I can use fun punctuation; semicolons are a perennial favorite of mine), and who often spends way too much time trying to interpret acronyms. (FYI, BRB, OMW, SOL, YMMV, IMO, TBH, etc. I do know what most of these examples mean due to much practice, but I honestly couldn't tell you what SOL stands for without Googling it. It has something to do with being out of luck, I think; let me check--oh, sweet, it uses a cussword! But other than that, I was right...) It took me so long to figure out what BRB meant the first time I ran across it that I'd already sent a text asking for interpretation--which, of course, didn't happen until the person on the other side of the phone came right back. (I legitimately thought it was some kind of misspelled version of the word bird.)

    And because texting has become hugely culturally prevalent, it shows up everywhere online.

    Then there are the people who don't seem to know how basic grammar works when they're writing forum posts. I've gotten to the point where I just accept that this is how things are when I run into this, but if I stop to think about it, sentences like, "i just finished my run and now im going to go watch some tv until its time for me to make dinner and then ill go to bed" still really bother me. It's not that hard to add in some capital letters and punctuation, I promise. It takes a little longer, to be sure, but it's so much more readable and understandable, and the number of times I've gotten confused due to a lack of clear punctuation is astounding, to say the least. (I generally just avoid thinking about it, because nobody deserves loads of negative thoughts in their direction for poor grammar, especially from a stranger. Also, I don't have the mental energy to correct the grammar of every second person on the Internet, so I choose to ignore it 97% of the time.)

    But perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to these sorts of speed-induced errors because of the few times I've gone too fast and said something I really did not want to say over a text message.

    On one notable occasion, my mom asked me to text my sister and ask her to shut the garage, because we'd forgotten on our way out of the house. Like a good girl sitting in the passenger seat, I whipped out my phone and sent the text so my mom wouldn't have to text and drive--but on the post-send-reread, I realized that I'd substituted a single letter in the verb of the message, and that changed the whole meaning of my text! Thankfully, my sister accepted my sincere apology and explanation, and when I told my cousin after, he thought it was just about the funniest thing he'd heard that day.

    Well, that's my soap box for the day, complete with one or two puns and a funny story. On a side note, if you haven't yet heard one of the greatest musical compositions of the last two centuries (or merely haven't heard it recently), here is a link to it. This might seem random, but I've been listening to this suite as I write this blog post, and I'm getting a very nice reminder that Holst was awesome. The scores of some movies may or may not have been based on this music; if you like Star Wars, you might find the first number familiar... ;)